Gordon Korman

Gordon Korman was born in 1963 in Montreal, Canada. In 1970, his family moved to a suburb of Toronto, the largest city in Canada. In middle school, he took English from a track-and-field coach who allowed the students to work on months-long, independent creative writing projects. During that time, Korman wrote the manuscript of his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall, about two young pranksters at a Canadian boarding school. Korman decided to send his manuscript to the publishing company Scholastic, because he served as the Scholastic Arrow Book Club monitor for his class and so felt he had a connection to the publisher. Scholastic bought the manuscript and published his book in 1978, when he was a freshman in high school. Korman wrote and published several more novels while in high school. After his high-school graduation, he went to New York University, where he studied film and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1985. He has continued to produce novels at a brisk pace; as of 2023, he has written more than 100 novels for children or young adults. Currently, he lives on Long Island in New York.